Snake
by dafthunk
Summary: Actually, Ryan doesn’t wear a hat at all – what you see is just another part of his sister, it’s an extracorporal piece of Sharpay attached to his occiput like a parasite.
1. One

Peter sports a goatee Sharpay wishes he would get rid of. Yet he is a good dresser: he listens to advice and buys well-tailored suits. He does not simply buy the first thing that comes into fashion. He goes to the gym three times a week, because even a well-made suit cannot hide a body treated badly. He enjoys opera and difficult plays. He drinks in moderation and only smokes in company; it is not possible –he tells her – to refuse a cigar offered by an important client after sealing a big deal: it would be insulting, unrefined. A lack of class is a plague that is afflicting our generation. Peter says he is lucky to be working for a sophisticated man such as her father. Sharpay nods: she says he is so completely right, about everything.

Peter is confident, and successful, and well-spoken, and nothing like the scrawny, awkward teenage boys Sharpay has long since tired of. She set her goals higher.

Peter says that cultured girls are hard to find these days. When you do, they pop out like a gem. Peter says that Sharpay is such a rare gem. Sharpay agrees.

* * *

Ryan says Peter is a sleazebag. Ryan says that Sharpay has to stop being so cheap. Ryan says that everyone saw how that slimebucket was edging his hand under her skirt and how she was letting him. Sharpay says that Ryan doesn't understand her, doesn't understand a thing. That he is so common, so naive, so predictable. That she is tired of him following her around, judging her. That he should stop jerking himself off underneath his blankets, and get some real experience. She says that he should grow some balls and face up to their parents about what he's really like.

* * *

The following morning Sharpay knocks on the door of Ryan's bedroom. I'm sorry, she says, but she's not sure he's heard. She goes down and makes coffee. She checks her cell phone: one message from her mother and one from the phone company.

* * *

Ryan thinks about a story he heard about a month ago, told by a boy with dark brown eyes. The story had gone like this:

_There was a square in that town, where every winter -up until last year- you could find an ice rink, a round one, with a fir tree in the middle that sprouted parabolas of Christmas lighting unto the wooden outer walls. If you happened to be a good skater, you would look up while gliding over the ice, and the strings of Christmas lights would turn into a cloud of fireflies, skimming over your head._

_It was there where the accident had taken place. It had been a boy, at a guess seven, and his name was Ben or Bart, and he wore a yellow coat. He had been arguing with his sister when he went head over heels on the ice. They had to have been going fast, at a break-neck speed, because the momentum caused them to slide a great deal further, and when the wicker-work of limbs had been untangled, the iron of his sister's ice skate was discovered, buried deep into the boy's head._

_When the courage to take him off the ice had finally been mustered, the blood had already formed a bright red circle that froze and became hard, like stone._

Not sure if it really did happen, the boy with the dark brown eyes had said.

But then again, Ryan had thought, stories don't need to have happened to be _true_.


	2. Two

On the back of Ryan's head, there's a very big, very ugly bump. No. A nipple then, a third nipple on the back of his head. Or no, an eye, an evil eye. And that's what he covers with his hat.

No.

Ryan uses his hat as a purse. It's simply a purse, his hat. Underneath, pressed against his skull, there's a little mirror, and a tube of foundation, and a shell with pale powder, and a lipstick the color of cherry blossom. Whenever he goes to the toilet he bows his head and brings down his hat. He folds it in two – both edges touching – and clasps it under his left armpit. He inspects his face in the mirror. He rummages in his hat in search for lipstick. That is why his lips are pinker than even his sister's. Hold on – no.

Actually, Ryan doesn't wear a hat at all – what you see is just another part of his sister, it's an extracorporal piece of Sharpay attached to his occiput like a parasite. If you'd touch it, if you should feel inclined to try the fabric, it would be like stroking Sharpay. I wouldn't do it.

Wait – he's coming here. Do you want him to hear us? He's going to the bathroom. You see? I told you so! I'm telling you. He's going into the bathroom to touch up his lips. You'll see. He's definitely rummaging in his hat right now, touching the contours of his make-up trinkets with his fingers, judging the scale of –

Hold on.

Yeah. Yes, I heard it too. Do you reckon we should call for someone? It could be – no. No, let it be. The bell is ringing. We should go. It's Frog Bladder right now and I don't want to be too late. Julie was too late in Frog Bladder's class once and he made her dust all of the stuffed animals in the attic – yes, biology has an attic – alone, at night, and then Frog Bladder turned off all the lights. Such a creep.

Come on. No, it's probably nothing.

* * *

Sharpay isn't feeling very well and stays home for rest of the day. Peter comes over. Peter says: this is your problem, not mine. Peter says: please don't tell your parents. Peter looks infantile, disgusting, weak. He begs. Please, now there's still time. Please, I can drive you there, but I can't get out of the car. You can understand that, can't you? Peter gets angry. I bet you did it on purpose. He goes. Sharpay waits until the sound of his car has gone before removing his phone number from her cell.

She sits on the couch for one or two minutes. She is strong. She doesn't feel anything. Then she stands up and walks to the kitchen. It's just past noon and there's a dish in the refrigerator for her. She places the plate in the microwave oven. Two minutes. She takes out the plate, removes the saran wrap, sits down, stabs the puree with her fork. The top layer steams with heat, but just underneath the food is still cold. She covers the plate with saran wrap again, puts it back into the microwave. One minute more. She takes out the plate, takes off the wrap. Steam burns her fingers and she almost drops the plate. It bangs against the table and some lumps of food jump out. Sharpay picks up a piece of meat and flings it back into the plate. It's far too hot. Her fingers hurt and she feels her eyes prickling with tears. She blinks until they are gone, sticks her fingers in her mouth. Her mouth feels too hot, which makes her fingers hurt even more. She runs to the fridge and grabs a bottle of mineral water. Her hands shake as she pours it, a stream of water flows over the glass and mixes with the sauce and puree that ended up on the table earlier. It turns into a slimy soup. Sharpay sticks two throbbing fingers into the glass of water. She takes her fork into her other hand. She tries a bite. The top layer is now dry and tepid, everything underneath still cold. The bite of food persists at the back of her tongue. Her mouth is dry. Before she fully realizes, she's sobbing. Fat tears gliding over her cheeks, dangling from the tip of her nose, dripping into her plate. Why does everything have to go wrong?

She is aware of how ridiculous she must look now, with her right hand in a glass of water, crying with a mouth full of puree she can't seem to swallow, the kitchen table smeared with muck, like a child, like a baby, oh god.

She feels stupid, hiccups from laughing, from crying. She thinks: they should see me like this.

* * *

Three quarters of an hour later she's fed the contents of her plate to the dog, she's cleared and cleaned the table, she's showered, rubbed her fingers with salve and re-applied her make-up. She sits on the couch with knees pulled up towards her chin. Her cell phone rests in her hand. She wants to tell him, wants desperately to have him tell her it's going to be all right, that he's going to be there for her, all the way.

She calls. Ryan does not answer.


	3. Three

Did you hear about Ryan?

I heard the entirety of the boys's bathroom floor was covered in blood. I heard it had crept into tiles, into corners, it had discolored the joints. They had to break open the floor, re-lay the tiles. Did you see the workmen come in yesterday? They worked on the floor for an entire afternoon. The boys had to go all the way to the West Building to pee.

I heard they found him with a tear in each arm running from wrist to elbow. That his skin had folded open like a book, and layers of muscle and fascia had bloomed out, neatly dissected like that frog in bio, after we'd pinned it down with needles.

That's how Gabriella found him, folded open in a carpet of blood. She refuses to talk about it.

Shame.

* * *

There's something inside Ryan's head.

It's the size of _maybe _a coffee bean. Almost dissapointing. There's a lot of time and resources and people crawling into that bean. It required a nurse waking him up very early in the morning, it required several blood samples, urine samples, a doctor shining a light into his eyes, making him smell small bottles filled with either perfume or ammonia, making him walk in a straight line, making him dart his eyes across all corners of the room, testing reflexes he didn't know he possessed. It required a hat of electrodes, glued to his scalp with gel, it required laying absolutely still on a shelf in a noisy tube while trying to suppress his urge to yawn. It was that last investigation that brought the bean to light. It was the result of that last investigation that the doctor was circling with his pen. It was the result of that last investigation that was making his mother cry.

The bean in his head sparks fireworks sometimes; that one time in the boys' restroom in the South Building, the first time, was the worst. He was washing his hands when the bean set the orchestra in his skull on fire and conducted his body with a stiff jerk towards the floor. On his way down he headed the sink so hard it cracked. When Gabriella came in – she had heard the sound of a body breaking in two and the scream that accompanied it – that was what she saw: Ryan, convulsing in a puddle of water, with a face covered in blood and chalk both red and white: a true wildcat. When the workmen came to install the new washbasin the next day, they had to brush the grub from inbetween the tiles.

* * *

When Ryan comes back from the hospital, head thickly wrapped with gauze from which his hair protrudes like the leaves of a pineapple, Sharpay wants to tell him.

She sits at the foot end of his bed and tells him about the bean growing inside of her. She wants to tell him only that, to tell him slowly, to watch his reaction, to stay firmly in control. Yet when the first words pass her lips she feels she cannot stop: marbles rolling from her tongue, boucing and breaking and dropping under the bed, behind dressers. Please don't tell mom, and please don't tell dad, she sobs, marbles dropping down her face. I want to keep it, I want to take care of it, she says, she hears herself saying: she makes the decision the exact moment she speaks the words.

She looks at his pale face. Shar, he says, oh, Shar.

Can you be there for me, she asks. She has never felt so young, not even as a child. She needs to hear him say it.

Oh, Shar, he says, and then his eyes roll back like milky white marbles and his body is a stricken string, shaking.

He recovers less than three minutes later – less than the duration of the song they were practicing last winter (Sharpay keeps catching herself measuring the present time in components of _before_). Mom pats Ryan's hand and fixes her gaze firmly on the window – she never did feel at ease looking after people.

I don't remember a thing since breakfast, Ryan says. That always happens, that's the most annoying part.

Your memory's always leaked like a sieve, Sharpay says. She doesn't know what else to tell him, or how.

* * *

Ryan looks up long, misspelled words he half-heard, half-remembered. He finds more long words, foreign words, and frightening numbers he doesn't dare show his mother. He calls the doctor who's office they left mere hours ago. Ryan can hear the doctor's family: a young daughter, a wife, the clang of cutlery on dishes, chairs shifting. Ryan stammers as he reads from the paper he so carefully prepared, listens to the doctor chew and swallow. The man says: you needn't believe everything you read. He says something about statistics and things like _in your case_ and _wait and see_. Ryan nods, even though no one can see him do it, and he mumbles a sorry for disturbing and a thank you for your help, even though he doesn't feel sorry or helped at all.


	4. Four

Sharpay is not doing very well. She went up from a size two to a six. I saw it after she returned from P.E., when the label from her shirt was sticking up against the nape of her neck. On top of that her nails are frazzled and she's already worn that same coat for four days in a row.

I heard Sharpay's got detention tomorrow; she's been incredibly rude towards Frog Bladder. Julie told me she's thrown a jar against the floor – one of those jars with a rat foetus in it – she threw it against the floor – or wait, no, the wall, she just lobbed it towards a wall, there was formaldehyde everywhere – and then she shouted at Frog Bladder that she hoped that that stupid rat would finally rot now, and then she started crying and no-one could understand a word she was saying, and then Frog Bladder sent everyone out of the classroom except for Sharpay.

Pay attention next time you're there: the rat is gone. Now it's just the crocodile egg and that mounted seagull, and an empty spot in the middle of the shelf.

* * *

Oh, the doctor says, after he places the transmitter on her belly. His eyebrows shoot up the thickness of a thumb.

I can see two, there's two of them. You see? He points with his finger on the screen. He's right: she can see two of them. The doctor shifts the transmitter to watch from different points of view. He draws a line on the screen with a mouse. The computer calculates weeks and days.

What are you thinking of? The doctor asks. Sharpay likes him. He doesn't ask the dreadful questions.

Are they boys or girls? She asks.

Too early to tell, he says. They won't necessarily be of the same gender. Fraternal.

Oh, Sharpay says, and she pretends to be surprised.

* * *

Since the last time Ryan went, the doctor has cultivated a moustache. It doesn't suit him at all, the heavy red brush cutting his thin face in half. Ryan has to exert the biggest effort to keep his mind on the conversation and not stare at the proliferation of hairs on the doctor's upper lip.

The neurological tests are fine. The new MRI shows the same bean as the previous one. Not only benign, but stable, too. A calcification. Could have been there for years already.

The doctor enunciates his words carefully, speaks slowly, pauses after every sentence to make sure Ryan and his mother understand. The seizures were caused by the head injury. That's cleared up nicely. His moustache make grotesque shapes in slow-motion. As for the very first fit that caused the injury in the first place: who knows. Probably – hopefully, we'll never find out. It might never happen again.

Weight, blood pressure, heart rate: a formality.

Insurance papers, letter for school, note for P.E., a list with precautions, a card with telephone numbers, signatures, stamps, a handshake, a pat on the back.

His mother says: Good, huh? and nudges him in the side.

The sun is blinding when he steps outside.

* * *

Psst. Guess who I just saw. Ryan. Ryan Evans. Just then. In the hallway. With his mom. I bet they're talking to the principal right now. And you know what? He didn't even look ill, or sad, or anything. He looks exactly the same as before. Looks better than his sister does, actually.

Maybe he hasn't been ill at all. Maybe he simply went on a holiday. Supervised by his mother. To Hawaii. To Madagascar. He crossed the country on the back of a tortoise, he drank fermented marsupial milk, he seduced a parrot into sitting on his shoulder with fructose-rich cakes brought over from the New world. I bet he rubbed his skin with pale powders, from head to toe, to conceal the fact that it had taken the color of the ginger earth.

Why didn't his sister join them?

His sister didn't come because she didn't want to. His sister didn't come because she doesn't have a good relationship with her mother. She can't stand her mother because they end up arguing endlessly about her future. Her mother can't stand her because she reminds her of the past. When they are together, her mother turns into a replica of her mother's mother, the one person she vowed she would never be. A snake that bites its own tail. Every beginning a new end.

His sister didn't come with them because it's not right, in her _condition_, to travel to adventurous places, to explore an unknown land on the back of a tortoise.

What do I mean by that? You know well enough what I mean.

How do I know? Doesn't _everybody_ know?

* * *

Do you want to know what I heard?

It's horrible.

It's revolting.

If it's true, then it's the single most disgusting thing I've ever heard. Yet it wouldn't surprise me one bit. Not when it concerns those two.

It'll come out deformed. It will have a growth on the back of its head, it will be born without limbs and it will inherit her rotten personality.

If I were Ryan, I'd want to off myself too.

* * *

That night, Ryan tells Sharpay a story he had heard two months ago, about a boy in a yellow coat who slipped and fell and whose last sensation was that of a skull splitting in two. He told her about ice, and how quickly it altered things, severing fraternal bonds in the space of a second.

Sharpay, Ryan says. You can't keep treating people this way.

Sharpay, do you realize what they're saying about you at school? About us? Do you know why they say it?

Do you know why they believe it?

* * *

Ryan's sister tells him he cares too much about what other people think of him. Ryan wants to say that's not true at all. He says: like you ever cared about anyone but yourself. Like you even know one person you'd suffer for. Anyone.

Ryan's fishing, he knows this, they both do. He feels juvenile: a spoiled child trying to prove a point. But he just wants to hear it. Needs to hear her say it, to him, for him. For her to show him he is worth indulging. Why can't she do this for him, just once. His eyes almost water at the want for it.

There is nothing in the world he wants more right now than for her to fold her arms around his shoulders, for her fingers to rake his hair upwards, to hear her tell him everything is going to be okay. And she just sits there, a doll made of snow, an awful smile frozen on her face.

I hate you I hate you I hate you, it keeps pounding through his head, and he spits venom, a poison which eats into the tongue and dissolves his words; they come out a garbled, frayed mess, more horrible, more vile than he has ever intended words to be in his entire life.

And she just sits there.

* * *

Sharpay sits alone in her room for hours on end. She speaks with a voice so soft it sounds like praying. Like she is directing the sound _inwards_. Ryan has listened (for hours on end) with a drinking glass on the door, spied through the keyhole, or, if the key was on the lock, lain on the floor and watched her feet and shadow through the gap under the door.

He doesn't understand what she is doing there, or why. He isn't used to seeing her so calm, so perfectly fine with as companionship only herself. Yet he gave her ample opportunity to acquire an audience. When he listens with the glass on the door he is never careful: he places the glass on the wood with a clear tap; shifts it a couple of times while he repositions himself.

Not once did he sense a response.

* * *

There is nothing that Sharpay can't do, she tells herself.

There is physics, but that's because the teacher doesn't like her. And maths, but there's calculators and accountants and life is much too complicated for formulas anyway. Excepting that, there is nothing she can't do, so this has to be a succes, too. There's going to be resistance, it is not going to be easy, but then again nothing is. Adversity only makes succes sweeter.

She'll show them she can make it on her own. She'll show them she can make it with the three of them. A girl and a boy: she knows that because she can feel it. She will teach them morals, and discipline, and old, forgotten habits like politeness and humility: habits her own mother never bothered instilling in her. She will dress them in beautiful hand-made clothes: she will buy fabric and a Singer sewing machine and draw patterns. A pretty princess dress for the girl. A sailor suit for the boy. She'll tell him to take care of his sister. She'll tell her to never lose him out of her sight. They'll love each other, sincerely, the three of them. They will tell each other everything.

They will need nobody else.


End file.
